The First Fashion Designer

First things first, let’s discuss what it means to even be a fashion designer. According to Fibre2Fashion, “Fashion design is a form of art dedicated to the creation of clothing and other lifestyle accessories. Modern fashion design is divided into two basic categories: haute couture and ready-to-wear.”

So Haute Couture consists of customized and one of a kind pieces. Think runway and celebrity or special event ensembles ! Ready-to-wear fashion is what you go to Saks Fifth, (or Target if you’re like me) to pick up on the go.

Ready-to-wear can be further broken down into a couple other categories; designer and confection. So the first dude to do the things was Charles Frederick Worth. Up until he set up his early 19th-century version of a popup shop, people in Paris anonymously made and sold dresses and the standards were solely set by royalty.

After some time his House of Worth pop up shop became so poppin’ that the village residents were able to attach a face and a name to it. That was the beginning of the current tradition of having a designated designer of a “house”.

House of Worth was founded in1858 and specialized in Haute Couture. The shop stayed in the family up until 1952 and then closed for good in 1956. The brand itself was revived once more in 1999. The new Spring/Summer collection didn’t debut until 2010.

Fun Fact: The empress at the time appointed Worth as the official court designer. This increased the quality of his reputation and in turn, his overall success.

Below you can see three examples of House of Worths’ most famous designs. You can see how regal in nature they are and they have the air of France for sure. Vintage dresses can still be found in obscure corners of the internet for up to $50,000 on the price tag.


Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s